Before & After & Inbetween

Today, King Amusement Creative announced on YouTube a TV anime of Tokyo Babylon done by GoHands production to come in 2021. The trailer is embedded below in case you are the single TB fan who lived under an extraterrestrial rock during the previous week. The animation in the trailer looks beautiful and the character design appears to be close to what we saw in Clamp in Wonderland.



However, I admit having very mixed feelings.

On the one hand - I'm all over the moon, too, because who wouldn't LOVE getting a TB anime?!?

On the other hand, there are two things that keep me from being all exuberant now.

Firstly, CiWo's character design (and the one in the trailer linked above) doesn't click well with me. It's beautiful, clear-lined, fluent, and works well for the twins, but Seishiro... looks strange for me. I guess mostly because of the different glasses, but sheesh - that's your shallow writer for you; and you can be sure it won't keep me from watching!
The second thing is more serious, though. I've only been an active participant - creating fan works, participating in discussions, etc. - in four small fandoms (Galaxy Rangers, Emperor's Edge, Viewfinder, and TBX - if you are curious), and two of them died when new material was released after a long hiatus.
In one case, it was just the release of the source material as a DVD set, in the other, the book series was continued after what was a bitter-sweet but fitting conclusion and the fandoms just evaporated. People consumed the new material... and discussions died down, interactions dwindled, exchanges stopped... the mailing list of the DVD fandom trickled down to being mostly the "you have to renew your subscription"-mail once a year, and the book forum became a ghost town, not over night, but within weeks of the new volume.
The fandoms didn't survive the new material. At all. Viewfinder never had a real hiatus, just an awfully slow release cycle to begin with, and I wasn't that active in it to begin with, so it can't serve as a counterexample.
I can help but fear that something similar may happen to TBX - and that would be so devastating.

Start-up summary that doesn't give too much away:

Zen Seizaki of the Tokyo District Prosecutor's office stumbles upon a conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company, a mysterious woman, and a political conundrum centered around suicides and the new district to be established in Western Tokyo.

The art work is decent. The subtitles (I used the German ones) are ok. The plot... WOW! (so far). I just finished ep.03 (streamed on Amazon) and am eagerly awaiting ep.4 (supposed to come next week). One of the things that caught my attention is that its based in today's Tokyo, with settings I recognized from the Mori bits in Family Matters, i.e. Kasumigaseki etc.
While a lot of the plot is criminal investigations, including interviews, etc. so far - there is a dark mystery / horror note throughout the tale that makes me wonder where the series is heading.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=20775

Ok, the six eps were fun, although I have to admit that I ended up watching the dubbed version (despite not all of the language jokes translate properly), because I had a hard time following -esp. the demonic- accents and the German subtitles on English sounds were... confusing. Sadly, the English subtitles included way too much sound description as to be not equally distracting, hence...

...but I digress. Overall, the series stays very close to the book (as far as I recall it) and shines whenever it focuses on Aziley - and I wish they'd put as much effort into the secondary and tertiary cast. Exaggeration is an acceptable method of style, but without enough substance it quickly becomes annoying (see Heavenly executive (tm)).

Anyways, all this complaining aside - it were two days of fun watching this. If you can get a hold of this, have fun! :-)

Now, back to the Decagram.

Finished watching Guardian tonight. It's a show I absolutely enjoyed, up to the point when they began with the time travel, at which point the show took a nose dive into an empty pool, sadly.

The characters introduced after that point (esp. the inventors in the past) were just cringeworthy, same for the "solution" of the final confrontation, which isn't sustainable - not in a social perspective (apartheit remains and is strengthened) and not in a physicist's perspective (that lantern's energy is limited, it ran out before, starting all the unresolved issues to arise - so all that sacrifice for another delay? Kinda like Brexit...Nope).

All that makes me wonder if they fired the writers at that point and replaced them with generic trope trainees (or tested a writing program on it, who knows?).

Final verdict:

likability: very high until timetravel; afterwards close to zero

rewatchability: ditto

writing probability: negligible

overall thought at the end: "Wie kann man eine tolle Serie in den letzten 10 % so verkacken?!" (German on purpose, don't ask).

A couple of posts about the tv series Game of Thrones have sprung up across my friends lists in the last couple of days, probably caused by the dvd release of season 1 in Germany and the airing of season 2 (?).
I've followed the posts closely and - so far - I've come to the conclusion that Game of Thrones is one of those fandoms, which I will avoid because I love the books and the tv show, and find its grisly depictions entirely befitting the source. (I only mourn that the direwolves didn't get as much attention as I'd wished for them).

( continuation of why )

Edit: Not all comments I got here are without spoilers, though. :/

...I would not want to have missed! (I exclude movies and books, otherwise this would be endless.)

[A.K.A. AKK is in list mode & doesn't know why].

( Comics )

( Anime )

( Live Action )

( Manga )

current chapter word count: 4178 (of which 200 are new words)
less because redundant scene bits were removed and the new scene in a different POV is more concise & to the point
new pov character: Akechi (throughout instead of a back and forth between him and Subaru)
character "on the prowl": Ijyuin Shigetoshi
character not wanting to go there: Subaru
surprisingly useful plot devices: tattered manga, consumer electronics, Huawei Technologies' office on the 46th floor of the Petronas Towers (tower 2) in Kuala Lumpur (though the latter may be used more extensively in the future)
research of the day: upcoming consumer electronics manufacturers of 2000 in Asia & plagiarism accusations, Kuala Lumpur in general, Petronas Towers and Islamic symbolism in particular (will be of interest in the further use of the location in the upcoming plot)
quote of the day: "If you continue like this, you'll wear a visible path into Imonoyama's parquet."

unrelated sidenote: I'm firmly addicted to the currently airing Korean period comedy "Sungkyunkwan Scandal" (same level as with Queen Seon Duk and Drama addicts summary is so not doing it any justice!). I wish there were English translations of the novels on which it is based.
related sidenote to the unrelated sidenote above: because I found myself refreshing the subbers' site about every other minute for the updates of it, I finally got myself a twitter account (AKK666AKK). It will be useful to keep track of the other sites giving twitter updates as well. I don't expect to say or retweet much, though.

current chapter word count: 4283
scene worked on: exorcism 2 (mostly)
issues resolved: how to do it, and Omi's uselessness
character now having a father from Nagasaki: Omi
character who's probably cursing light-sensitive eyes now: Seishiro
character who still can't save the dog: Subaru (but he's not pining about it)
research of the day: Roman catholic church in Japan and the Philippines, Saint Joseph (as saint), prayer therefore
quote of the day: "That wasn't hidden."

Unrelated side-note (1): tulip garden jigsaw puzzle of 5146 pieces finished! Maybe I post a photo tomorrow.

unrelated side-note (2): I truly enjoyed the Korean "feel-good" dorama "Personal Taste". I especially enjoyed that none of the characters was one-sided good or evil (except one of the secondary cast) and that they used a lot of the common "gay cliches" only to turn them upside-down with their characters, revealing the stereotypes for what they are. I really had fun watching this one. :-)

current chapter: Epilogue A - Family Business
scene structure: Breakfast - Omi's arrival - At the cafe - House visit of Hell - Talk Shop - to Shibaura - exorcism 1 - discovery - exorcism 2 - in the shadow of Rainbow Bridge - Ueno Station - Tree visit [complete, incomplete]
scene worked on today: exorcism 1
character flashing the harbor: Subaru
character losing his patience: Seishiro
character not feeling useful: Omi
useful plot items: magical flashes, kekkai (or lack thereof), limitations of illusions
quote of the day: "Standard shipping goods don't warrant this kind of reception!"

unrelated side-note: Zettai Kareshi (Absolute Boyfriend) is one of the few examples where the dorama treatment of the material exceeds the manga it's based on in effect and entertainment! If you can get a hold of those 11 eps and the movie length special that completes the series: do it! It's worth the effort and the time to watch it. The first ep might not be the best one, but it continuously improves from there on. ♥

Today I spontaneously bought a three dvd set of "Blood Ties" (first 12 eps), admittedly without knowing anything about the series but the few tiny pictures on the cover, the text next to it, and the vague memory of books of the same title in my favorite book store.
My monetary freeway isn't that well tarred as to me typically buying dvds without sound research about the content. This was an atypical buy. ( And a surprisingly delightful one. )
I definitely have to get the remaining eps. Now.